10 Gems from IdeaCast’s First 1,000 Episodes

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.

CURT NICKISCH: And I’m Curt Nickisch.

ALISON BEARD: Today, Curt and I are in the studio together because we’re celebrating a milestone. This is our 1000th episode.

CURT NICKISCH: Unbelievable. If you’re more recent listeners, you might not know that IdeaCast launched almost 20 years ago in 2006.

PAUL MICHELMAN: Hello and welcome to the very first edition of the HBR IdeaCast, a soon-to-be bi-weekly audio show from Harvard Business School Publishing. My name is Paul Michelman. I’m an Executive Editor here, and I’ll be your host.

ALISON BEARD: Since then, a lot has changed. Our hosts, of course, but also the theme music, the frequency, the pace and complexity of business, and we’ve had lots of major world events.

SARAH GREEN: Does the financial crisis of September 2008 mark the end of an era? Hi, I’m Sarah Green of Harvard Business, and that’s one of the questions…

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch. Admit it, bosses are the best even when we don’t enjoy…

Wow. Those last two clips, Alison, those were your and my first appearances as hosts on the show. Feeling a little nostalgic here and grateful.

ALISON BEARD: Yes, I think we were both much slower in our introductions when we started. And of course I was a listener before I was a host, and I have such fond memories of my predecessors. So, thank you to Paul and Sarah for everything you brought to the show. But what really stands out for me are the guests that we’ve featured over the years, and of course their ideas.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. That hasn’t changed over 1000 episodes. Our commitment to presenting the best thinking on business management and leadership, great voices with timeless insights.

ALISON BEARD: So, today we’ve chosen 10 episodes from across our archive that will help you supercharge your career. We picked them to highlight the essential skills that we all need, whether we’re in our first jobs, managing a team, or leading an organization.

CURT NICKISCH: So, we’re going to start with a basic question: Why do you work? What do you work for? A key theme that we’ve seen in business over the past decade is “purpose”. It’s the idea that companies should be more than profit machines and individuals should find more meaning in their work. So, this first episode is about finding your personal purpose in the work that you do, and using that as a foundation on which you build your career. This is a conversation I had in 2019 with Nicholas Pearce. He’s a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and here’s how he answered a question for me on the show.

What if you don’t know what your life’s work is? How do you find that personal mission statement? Because finding the right job or choosing a career is a lot of work in itself.

NICHOLAS PEARCE: So, we have to start asking the deep questions of purpose and identity in order to get to life’s work. It’s about the work and the impact we feel most called to make at any given point in our lives. It’s the work that we cannot not do. It is engaging in the radical act of connecting our souls with our roles.

ALISON BEARD: So, I love that line, “our souls with our roles”. Maybe you’re working for a purpose-driven company, and so it’s sort of easy to find that. But you can also find meaning in your own contribution, whether that’s making customers happy, or helping your colleagues, or even just supporting your family. And so, I love starting with this clip, because Nicholas is right: We have to think about work as something a little bit bigger in order to really be successful at it.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, yeah. What I like about him is that he says that your purpose could be very simple, right? It doesn’t have to be highfalutin, but you do need to understand it and that you will be happier when you do.

ALISON BEARD: Absolutely. So, for the next clip, though, we want to get a little bit more tactical, bring it down to the ground, and we’re going to feature an episode from way back in 2008. This was our founding host, Paul Michelman, interviewing Holly Weeks, a communications consultant. They’re talking about a key skill for any career; good communication. Holly has advice for how to say hard things at work without upsetting people. She calls it “temperate phrasing”.

HOLLY WEEKS: It’s not phrasing that triggers the counterpart, it’s not escalating, it’s not disrespecting yourself or your counterpart. It’s temperate, non-provocative phrasing.

PAUL MICHELMAN: So, let’s say that you and I are in a meeting together, and I just put up my hand and offered a really dumb idea and tried to start a conversation around it, and that conversation was going to derail any chance that we were going to have an effective meeting. How do you tell me it’s a dumb idea?

HOLLY WEEKS: That is so hard that I probably wouldn’t try to tell you, “It’s not a dumb idea,” and I might listen to what you say, not if appropriate, have any nonverbal response I want that’s appropriate, and then say, “I see it differently. Paul.”

CURT NICKISCH: I really, really enjoyed this episode, because she is so good at explaining how to say what you mean in a professional and clear way. She said that a lot of times when you think to yourself when you’re in a meeting, “I can’t say that. I can’t say that to my boss. I can’t say that to my coworker,” she says, “Actually, you can say that. You just can’t say that that way.” And she shares these tips on how to actually say what you mean and communicate clearly in a way that isn’t offensive or doesn’t derail the conversation.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Every job is going to require difficult conversations, and you have to know how to handle them first to advocate for yourself and your ideas, and then to become a good leader who can manage conflict on a team.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. Well, she also gave an example of when somebody makes you an offer for a job or a raise and it’s not enough money. She was just like, “I would take it if I could, but it’s not enough for me.” Which is like…

ALISON BEARD: Right.

CURT NICKISCH: Right?

ALISON BEARD: Exactly.

CURT NICKISCH: It’s clear and very diplomatic in a way, but also just doesn’t shirk the conflict at hand.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I often find that some of the best advice that we get for operating in the business world also really works in your domestic life, too. So, definitely the next time I’m having a fight with my husband, instead of saying, “Are you crazy?” I’m going to say, “I see it differently, Scott.”

CURT NICKISCH: Well, sticking with interpersonal communication here, there’s also a strategy aspect to communication, right? And this next episode gets at that. It’s a conversation that Sarah Green Carmichael had with Lisa Rosh, who was then a Management Professor at the Sy Syms School of Business at Yeshiva University. She’s now at NYU. The title of the episode is: “Lead Authentically Without Oversharing.” Which explains it so clearly, right? There’s this belief that you should be yourself at work, and that workplaces where people can be authentic are going to be more productive. And Rosh shares her research about how to do that, how to model that as a leader, when to share something about yourself, and how.

LISA ROSH: For effective self-disclosure, we’ve found that there’s two main elements. The first: It must be genuine. That may sound like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how often we find managers fabricating stories to fit the situation, fudging the details. If I had one thing to say to an executive, it is: Do not exaggerate. Do not make up stories. People are smart, they figure it out, and it can do irreparable harm. A less-than-perfect disclosure that fits the emotion of the situation is much better than being disingenuous. The second thing I would say is that the self-disclosure must fit and further the task at hand. That means it must include the timing, the substance, and the process. It must help the task. It cannot be for promoting oneself or fulfilling one’s need for approval.

CURT NICKISCH: That is so insightful, I’ve found. She basically says: Be yourself, but be it carefully.

ALISON BEARD: All the research shows that leaders who show vulnerability, who behave more authentically are more trusted and are more successful at leading their teams. So, I think for anyone trying to establish strong connections at the office, it’s really so important.

CURT NICKISCH: So, we talk to researchers like Lisa Rosh. We also talk to practitioners, and one thing we often do on the show is we talk to practitioners in extreme job settings. So, the Chief Astronaut on the International Space Station, where you live with your co-workers, right? Or in this episode we’re about to hear, a fighter pilot. And one reason why we do this is that when you hear from people in work situations where there’s really no leeway, there’s little time for miscommunication, there’s a small window for negotiation, these people have often developed proven techniques that the rest of us can learn from, even if it’s not life or death for us. And that’s why we published this episode last year called: “How One F-35 Fighter Pilot Makes Decisions Under Pressure.” I talked to Hasard Lee, and he shared his techniques that he’s developed and has been trained on, like calculating expected value before you make a decision. And very importantly, something too few of us do and too few organizations do, is to learn from your past decision-making, what the US Air Force calls a debriefing. And that’s something that Lee says the Armed Service crafts really carefully and has down to a science to ensure that it really gets the best results.

HASARD LEE: It is a sacred place for us. We’re not worried about the person, we’re worried about the action. The base commander could be flying as a wingman. He’s in charge of the entire base, he’s flown for 20, 30 years, and he could be debriefed by a 23-year-old captain. So, it really takes a lot of effort and work, but if you’re able to do it right, I’ve never seen a better tool for being able to improve decision-making than the debrief. If you schedule it for five minutes, it’s probably going to be one minute. So, schedule a 30-minute block, and go through how you can be better after every project. At the end of every week, write down a few things that you can improve upon, and over the course of a year or two, you’ll be surprised at how much improvement you make.

ALISON BEARD: So, first, very cool to have interviewed a fighter pilot. I definitely felt some Top Gun vibes during that episode. But yeah, he talks about that three-step process for decision-making. So, again we’re going from this idea, how you make decisions in critical time-sensitive environments, to tactics. Assess, choose, execute I think are his three steps. Debriefing I think is really learning how to better assess. It really struck me that it’s something that every individual can do. Sure, you can absolutely do it as a team. Very important to have everyone talking about what could have gone better. But it’s something all of us could do every day to make sure that we’re getting better and making better decisions as we go along. And so, when we’re talking about ways to supercharge your career, that sort of reflection I think is incredibly important.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, and it just increases your chances of getting to a place in your career where you want it to get to, right?

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So, our next episode is about how to make decisions when you’re at a stage in your career when you actually feel like there aren’t that many options or paths left open to you. It’s called: “Making Peace with your Midlife, Mid-career Self,” and it’s an interview I did with Chip Conley, a former hospitality industry CEO and founder of the Modern Elder Academy, who made a very big change mid-career.

CHIP CONLEY: And I had a bit of a seize-the-day moment where I said, “Gosh, I can consciously curate my life differently if I choose to.” And it meant I had to really say goodbye to some identities, and some roles, and some of how I was living my life. I now call that the “great midlife edit”, because the first half of your life is about accumulating and the second half of your life is about editing. It was really helpful for me, because what it allowed me to do in my ’50s is to have a little bit more of a blank slate and say, “Okay, so, now that I’ve junked all these things, how do I want to live my life? What is going to give me meaning in my life?”

ALISON BEARD: Okay. So, I do have to admit that I did this episode for myself, because I’m deep in the bottom of what researchers call the “U-curve of Happiness” that comes with middle age. I read Chip’s book and a bunch of others for an essay in the magazine, and on HBR.org if listeners want to look it up, it’s called, “Can We Make Middle Age Less Miserable?” And my takeaway from that research and my conversation with Chip is that we can. My very favorite line from the book, which I reference in the episode is, “Show up so they notice your energy, not your wrinkles.”

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, yeah. No, I listened to this one intently. And it’s funny that you said you did it for yourself, because I do have a friend who when I told him the work I do, he said, “Oh, how cool. What an amazing life hack.” You get to ask questions about things that you’re wondering about or struggling with in your work or your career, and people will help sort it out for you. Fortunately, we publish everything that we do. So, I get the life hack, but so do listeners. I really appreciated how he talked about the opportunity you have in your mid-career to edit, to do things differently. He talked about sort of the future regret minimization strategy that he went through to think about what he wanted to do differently, and why. And he also recognized the wisdom that comes with midlife, and I thought a lot of that was really encouraging.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I came away with a really positive mindset, and on the regrets I have to shout out another episode that we did with Dan Pink talking about what people regret most at the end of life, and people regret what they don’t do much more than what they do do. So, a bias toward action, which I think is what Chip was also advocating for.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. Well, from mid-career to the middle of this episode, we’re going to take a quick break, and then we’re going to shift our focus to leadership career skills. We’re going to hear from a legendary Hollywood director, a big tech CEO, and a business strategy icon. Stay with us.

ALISON BEARD: Okay, we’re back. Let’s move on to the next episode. So, as you said earlier, Curt, we interview a lot of professors and business leaders on this show, but sometimes we get to learn from leaders in other fields. We already heard from a fighter pilot. We also talk to actors, politicians, athletes, and in 2022, I had the opportunity to speak with actor, producer, director, Ron Howard. I’m sure many of our listeners will remember some of the films he directed: Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2002. But as a movie director, Ron is also a leader, and he told me that he actually adapts his leadership style for each of the actors he works with. It’s something he learned early in his career when he was working with the actress, Bette Davis.

RON HOWARD: She was in her 70s, but she was still Bette Davis, multi-Oscar-winning diva. And she wasn’t crazy about me directing. She thought I was this young guy from a sitcom, and I really had to struggle to sort of earn her respect. Which I ultimately did by using a kind of creative logic of rolling up your sleeves and saying, “Oh, this isn’t quite working. How might it work? What should we do? What do you think?” And she wound up being very complimentary of me by the end.

ALISON BEARD: Okay. So, I have to say a few things about this interview. First of all, he grew up on movie sets, and he was just a voracious learner. He took cues from everyone that he saw, and then he used it to figure out how to work with people like Bette Davis. Secondly, he just had so much great advice about managing your career, seeking out new experiences, roles, and responsibilities, and then managing diverse talent, including all of those big egos in Hollywood.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. What I liked about his interview was just the parallels between movie production and innovation and startups. He really sounded a lot like these teams who come together very quickly, where you have to work with people with a lot of different expertise and put complex groups together on very crazy timelines. That’s one thing about IdeaCast I think as a show, there will be interviews with people who work in a different industry than you, but there’s so much that you can learn from how people are approaching problems and solving problems. There’s a lot you can steal. So, even if the interview’s not with somebody who’s talking about your job specifically, there’s so much to learn.

ALISON BEARD: Absolutely. A hundred percent agree with that. But of course, we do talk to the very top leaders in business as well to get lessons from them about careers, about managing people, and managing organizations. And one of the leading executives of our time is Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella. HBR Editor-in-Chief Adi Ignatius interviewed him for the IdeaCast in 2017 to talk about the choices he’s made in his career that led him to the C-suite.

ADI IGNATIUS: At least a couple of times in your Microsoft journey, you were put into jobs that pulled you way out of your comfort zone. I’d like you to talk a little bit about that phenomenon both as a managerial approach, that somebody put you in that position, and then as a kind of learning approach, good and bad, to suddenly be somewhere that you really never thought you would be.

SATYA NADELLA: It was not about: This is somehow going to be the next move I need to make in some grand plan to get to the corner office. That definitely was not the case. In fact, I distinctly remember Steve saying, “Hey, look, if you go to Bing and you don’t do a good job or succeed, it might just be your last job.” But what at least drove those choices for me was more about: Hey, what can I learn? Where can I have impact? Where can I uniquely contribute? And that has I think in some sense defined who I am, and more importantly the career I’ve had.

ALISON BEARD: Okay. So, he had a tough job ahead of him, right? Microsoft wasn’t perceived as the absolute leader in the tech industry anymore. But he really is best known for shifting the culture of the company towards what he was talking about in that clip; always learning, being curious. And that has not just propelled his career… Obviously it has, but it has propelled the company. And I love that IdeaCast gives us and our listeners access to thought leaders like that.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. What we heard him say there I think is also a really good lesson today. Because you hear people talk about herky-jerky careers. There isn’t just the standard way up. That kind of route to advance in organizations is not as clear as it maybe used to be. That insight about how to know whether something is a good move for you is super helpful.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. You need to be ready for growth, and you need to embrace it. So, it was cool to hear from him directly on that.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, for sure. Let’s stick with organizational decision-making here with another episode from the same year. It’s called: “Transcending Either/Or Decision Making,” and our guest was Jennifer Riel. At the time she was a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business. She still teaches there, but she’s now a partner and strategy designer at IDEO. And she told me through some fun examples about the film industry about integrative thinking, which is a technique to develop strategy to innovate on kind of classic trade-off thinking.

JENNIFER RIEL: There are some problems for which making the trade-off is unacceptable. If I make the trade-off, I lose. If I make the trade-off, it’s not going to solve the problem. And it is in that situation where you ask yourself, “Could there be a better way? Could I imagine doing something either than choosing the either/or, or finding the barely acceptable compromise, and actually seek to create a better choice, something new that doesn’t exist today?”

ALISON BEARD: There were great examples in that conversation from The Lego Movie, and the Toronto Film Festival. But what I liked best was, again, how practical she got. From this big idea, let’s move beyond either/or decision-making. She broke down a four-stage process; Get clear about the problem, compare solutions, generate new possibilities, and then test them. And I think that the world of business is so complex and fast-moving right now that it’s even more important than ever to think beyond the obvious, to work to come up with really innovative, out-of-the-box solutions when the existing options just aren’t cutting it.

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, for sure.

ALISON BEARD: Another challenge that a lot of us will deal with, either on an individual or team organizational level if we work long enough, is managing stress and even burnout. But it’s a concept that’s really often misunderstood. Research shows that it’s not something we can tackle on our own. In fact, it has to be addressed collectively by leaders. So, in late 2020 amid the pandemic, I interviewed Christina Maslach, one of the researchers who actually introduced the concept of burnout back in the 1970s, to learn more about how we can help each other avoid or recover from it. What would you say to a worker who feels like their boss isn’t aware of their burnout and isn’t trying to prevent it? What can that person do?

CHRISTINA MASLACH: You’ve got to make it a social thing, not an individual one. Anytime it’s just an individual and I need to talk to my manager or the boss or whatever, the common response often is, “Well, what’s wrong with you? What’s your problem?” And you don’t always get good traction. You don’t get something that somebody says, “Yeah, well, let’s talk about it and see if we can figure out how we can do this better.” And so, we really need all hands on deck to put our heads together and sort of say, “Okay, what might be some things that we might try?” and not shy away from just the little stuff. Because it’s the little chronic stuff that is really the cause of burnout.

CURT NICKISCH: What I loved about your interview with her is just how she talked about this as a systemic problem. She said for instance, if you are suffering burnout, a lot of the advice is, “Go meditate, or take a vacation, or take a break.” And she’s like, “But why is our advice to leave the situation you’re in?” That actually doesn’t solve the problem.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. As I said, this episode was recorded mid-pandemic, it was before vaccines were out, and man, we were all really burned out, especially people in the healthcare and retail and other essential sectors. But it was very clear to me that the problem was building before then, and I actually feel like it’s gotten a little bit worse since, in that we’re all trying to do more with less, we’re all feeling stressed, we’re all a little bit overwhelmed by our jobs and our lives. And I’m not sure that employers are giving people what they need; a manageable workload, autonomy, recognition, community fairness, and values or meaning. And if you are a manager, you need to make sure that your teams are okay, right?

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. Well, with community, a big part of that solution… It also figures in our last episode. We started talking about purpose. We’re going to kind of end with it, too, by considering purpose in the larger context of society. So, number 10 is a conversation from 2011 with Harvard Business School Professor, Michael Porter, titled: “How to Fix Capitalism.” And Porter shared the idea from his landmark article on shared value, and he said something that really struck me. He said that all profits are not created equal. There are good profits and there can be bad profits.

MICHAEL PORTER: Milton Friedman famously argued that the social responsibility of business was to maximize its profits, and this simple act of profit maximization was good in and of itself. That was enough. That was sufficient. So, what was good for business was sort of axiomatically good for society.

But I think as we’ve seen the effect of business practices on things like health, and nutrition, and the mortgage crisis, there’s example after example where actually it’s much more complicated than that. And yes, profit is not inconsistent with society’s needs, but if you think about creating economic value in a narrow way, if you don’t understand really the broader and more subtle and longer-term influences on the ultimate sustainability of a firm’s success, you can get into a situation where that profit really does come at the expense of society.

CURT NICKISCH: This conversation highlights the shift from shareholder capitalism, where you maximize shareholder value, shareholder returns above all, to shared value or what we also talk about today as “stakeholder capitalism”.

ALISON BEARD: The question is: So, why are we including this in our highlights of episodes that will help you supercharge your career? Because at HBR, we do really believe that businesses should be a force for good in society, that all of us can push our organizations toward this goal of shared value that Porter outlined, that we should choose jobs and careers that help us do that.

CURT NICKISCH: Right. What companies do and what business does is up for debate. To be a leader today, you do need to understand that context.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah.

Thanks for joining us for this special episode of the HBR IdeaCast.

CURT NICKISCH: We hope that some of these ideas inspire your career, and we’re thrilled as ever to bring more of these great voices, insights, and ideas to you. Meanwhile, we’ve just talked about one percent of our first thousand episodes. There are 990 other episodes in our archive full of timeless advice and insights to manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them all at HBR.org/podcasts, or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

ALISON BEARD: Thanks to our current team, Senior Producers, Mary Dooe and Anne Saini, Associate Producer, Hannah Bates, Audio Product Manager, Ian Fox, Senior Production Specialist, Rob Eckhardt, and our fearless leaders, Maureen Hoch and Adi Ignatius. You don’t hear these folks in our episodes, but they do so much to make our show possible every week.

CURT NICKISCH: We also want to acknowledge the people at HBR who have made huge contributions since HBR IdeaCast launched in 2006. You heard some of them in this episode. Former hosts, Paul Michelman and Sarah Green Carmichael; founding producer, Adam Buchholz; and other key editorial and production staff like Katherine Bell, Eric Hellweg, and Caleb Hoffman. We wouldn’t be here today without their hard work and devotion to this enduring show.

ALISON BEARD: And our heartfelt thanks to all the expert guests who have shared their knowledge with our audience over the years. They put the “idea” in IdeaCast, and we’re so grateful to them.

CURT NICKISCH: And thank you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Curt Nickisch…

ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard.